Marketing is Losing the Plot

By Vinny Rinaldi – Vice President, Media & Marketing Technology

We’re So Obsessed With the Now That We’re Forgetting the Brand

We’re living through a crisis in marketing—one of our own making.

Somewhere along the way, our industry became addicted to the short term. Performance media dashboards became our north star. ROAS, CAC, MQLs, and “efficiency” became the language we speak. Brand building—the long-term investment in future demand—got crowded out by the tyranny of this quarter’s results.

The irony? Most of us know better. But the pressure to show impact now often outweighs the conviction to build enduring equity over time.

Two recent conversations on Uncensored CMO, hosted by the ever-curious and incisive Jon Evans , crystallized this issue better than anything I’ve heard in a while.

In Marketing secret sauce, Todd Kaplan—Kraft Heinz’s CMO and one of the most progressive brand builders in the business—said it plainly:

“If you’re only chasing performance and not investing in brand, you’re renting your growth—not owning it.”

That line stopped me in my tracks. Because it’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Renting attention through increasingly undifferentiated ads, interchangeable activations, and purpose-washing campaigns designed to game the algorithm rather than earn a place in culture.

Kaplan goes on to emphasize that brand building is not the antithesis of performance—it’s the fuel for it. Pepsi’s resurgence in recent years hasn’t come from short-term tactics alone. It’s come from long-term platform thinking, cultural storytelling, and a commitment to bold, consistent creativity.

That message is echoed—and then turned up to 11—in Why advertising is broken & how to fix it where Jon sits down with the ever-provocative Tom Goodwin. In classic Tom fashion, he doesn’t hold back:

“We’ve mistaken data for insight, targeting for strategy, and personalization for persuasion.”

He’s not wrong. Somewhere in the rise of precision marketing, we lost our sense of imagination. We started micro-targeting ourselves out of mass relevance. We built complex marketing tech stacks to serve ads faster and cheaper—but forgot to make anyone actually care.

Goodwin argues that in our pursuit of efficiency, we’ve made marketing smaller, not better. We’ve become obsessed with measuring everything except the one thing that matters most: the brand’s place in the mind and heart of the consumer.

So where do we go from here?

We return to balance.

Long-term brand building and short-term sales activation aren’t at odds—they are the yin and yang of effective marketing. Les Binet and Peter Field showed us this years ago: 60% brand, 40% activation. And yet, in many boardrooms and budget meetings, that ratio has been flipped—or ignored entirely.

We need to start asking ourselves tougher questions:

• Are we building memory structures or just chasing impressions?
• Are we planning for next quarter or the next five years?
• Are we investing in fame or just reach?

The marketers who lead the next era of growth will be the ones who champion the brand—consistently. Who fight for creativity with spine and clarity. Who refuse to let quarterly performance targets become a substitute for enduring value.

Brand is the moat. Brand is the multiplier. Brand is the business.

We all know this. But it’s time we act like it again.